It Isn't About Chess

This poem first appeared on Substack in October 2023 when Paul's Substack had only 32 subscribers. I think it's worth posting again for those who've never had to opportunity of reading it.

Trying to understand where I am is like trying to understand the game of chess if I were one of the pieces. Any move I might make seems to be an impossibility. 

I was there at the beginning, alone among the stars, waiting for you at the still center where nothing moved but everything hung silent in the vast quiet while the outside of the circle spun around endlessly.

Now the days stack up like stones heavy on my chest. 

I bury the bones of old dreams under the willow and pray for rain. 

Writing is distraction, redemption, salvation and reprieve.

Letters flow, typography dances, text blocks rise with ineluctable elegance, kerning and justification transforms white space into rhizomatic rivers flowing as paragraphs open and the vistas widen.

The center expands away from itself in every direction, beginnings find their futures, endings find their pasts, while the middle that knows only itself is both sunrise and sunset, present only in the incomprehensible instant of what was flowing into what never was, becoming what might have been, leaving behind what never will be, arriving finally at what is—the arrival speculative, provisional, temporary.

In the end, what writes is not the hand that holds the pen.

What is written comes from somewhere else.

What is meant is not in the eye that reads.

© Paul Wittenberger, Substack October 27, 2023